The average school board attorney in the U.S. makes about $110,683 a year. But Michael Inzelbuch, the attorney for Lakewood Public Schools, makes that much in less than two months.. According to today’s Asbury Park Press, Inzelbuch has taken home $800,000 in each of the last two years. In 2020 and 2021, he took home a cool million a year. This is in a district that is so short on cash that it has demanded a “loan” from the state to cover a $93 million budget hole for school year 2023-2024.

Of course, Lakewood is complicated, as we’ve often reported, with 4,539 in-district students, almost all Hispanic and low-income, and 42,000+ private school students, who attend 160 ultra-Orthodox yeshivas around the city and the second most expensive special education private school in the state.

Yet doesn’t Inzelbuch’s deal sound a bit too sweet?

• “He is the highest paid, by far, public employee in the State of New Jersey,” said David Sciarra, founder of the New Jersey Education Law Center, which tracks such issues. “Governor, supreme court chief justice, he’s by far making the most money of anybody who is paid through public tax dollars.” Earlier, Sciarra said, “it’s clear the Lakewood School Board will pay Mr. Inzelbuch whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, with no accountability. (Acting) State Education Commissioner (Angelica) Allen-McMillan needs to explain to the parents and students in Lakewood why she won’t act to stop this outrageous abuse of public tax dollars.”

• “It’s too high,” said Arthur Lang, a Lakewood High School teacher and attorney who has led a 9-year-old lawsuit against the state seeking more funding for the district. “You have a district that is struggling for cash and he is the highest paid lawyer in the state.”

• Paul Tractenberg, Lang’s partner in the lawsuit, has said, “the notion that a district that is struggling to find dollars to educate its students is laying out (hundreds of thousands of dollars) to its attorney is obscene and immoral.”

• Richard Bozza, executive director of the New Jersey Association of School Administrators, said, “there is no compensation for any school district employee that approaches his compensation. Those numbers are unheard of anywhere else in the State of New Jersey.”

•  “I don’t have insight into the particulars of it, the number is eye-popping,” noted Gov. Phil Murphy.

Why doesn’t the state have “insight”? After all, for a full decade Lakewood has had the services of a state-appointed Fiscal Monitor, to whom NJ taxpayers have paid almost a million dollars.

Yet (especially given the last few days) let’s not denigrate Lakewood with too broad a brush. Sure, the Lakewood School Board’s chutzpah in approving this sort of thing is shady. But let’s look at a few other examples of profligate pay-outs to school administrators.

The Press reports that the Wall Board of Education approved a separation agreement with Wall High School Principal Rosaleen Sirchio that keeps her on paid leave at her $200,000 salary until her official retirement next June. She’ll also get “a lump sum payment of just under $100,000 upon her retirement date of June 30, 2024.” It’s unclear how this deal came about but some point to her alleged improper behavior during a senior class trip to Disney World in Florida and repots of seven Wall High School football players accused of bullying and hazing younger students in the boy’s locker room, including attacking a 10th grader with a broomstick.

In Bayonne, the Jersey Journal reports that Superintendent John Niesz just signed a deal with the school board there that pays him more than $300,000 in the last year of the five-year deal that starts in July 2024. He also gets an additional $10,000 in annual “stipends.”

According to News12, elementary school principal Michael Plias is on paid leave from Springfield Public Schools where he’ll get $82K next June for not showing up. Meanwhile, he’s working for Lindenhurst Union Free School District as a principal making $140,000 at the same time.

Hey, it’s only money.